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Steve Coll Talks About the Power of Exxon Mobil

By John Williams May 2, 2012 1:17 pmMay 2, 2012 1:17 pm

In his new book, “Private Empire,” Steve Coll offers an expansive portrait of Exxon Mobil: its leaders, operations, global entanglements, environmental impact and relationship to the United States government. In a recent interview via e-mail, Mr. Coll discussed the company’s access to various presidents, the future of energy consumption and more. Below are excerpts from the conversation.

Q.

Dwight Garner called the book, “perhaps surprisingly,” “impartial.” Did you feel sympathetic toward Exxon Mobil as you researched?

A.

I try to think of my goal as a reporter more as empathy than sympathy. I want to understand and describe how the world looks to any of my subjects, why they act as they do. The aggregation of empathy is, I suppose, a form of impartiality.

Q.

Was the company’s access to the government under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney drastically different from other administrations?

A.

The executives and lobbyists I interviewed said they had as much access to the Clinton administration as they did to the Bush administration. They found the Obama administration tougher going overall, especially early on.

Q.

If anything, it seems after reading the book that Exxon is in the driver’s seat with the government, and that it would be misleading to think of any given administration being more “friendly” to the company. Is that an accurate impression?

A.

I’d say Exxon Mobil and the U.S. are kind of parallel governments — sometimes in alliance, sometimes in opposition, and often just trying to keep their distance from one another. That is true across presidencies.

Q.

This is a huge subject, and a big book. How did you choose a structure for it, and how did that guide your research?

A.

Initially I conceived of a more general narrative of oil and American power in recent years, something of an updated version of Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize,” but one set in an era of limits and opposition for Big Oil. After six or more months of research, I decided to choose a single company to tell the larger story. Exxon Mobil seemed the only logical choice for American readers. Its size, power and footprint around the world also appealed. I then started to work on a structure that would move forward chronologically from the late 1990s, but also cut back and forth among settings. I had in mind those international thrillers — the movies where a plane is landing and a subtitle comes up, “Tehran” or “Abuja,” and then the next scene is at the White House. The last piece of the structure fell into place when the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill took place in 2010. That event made me think I should bookend the narrative with twin oil spills — opening with the Exxon Valdez wreck, in 1989, and closing, more or less, with the Deepwater Horizon.

Lauren Shay LavinSteve Coll

Q.

Lee Raymond, the former C.E.O., claimed that Exxon Mobil didn’t want the government’s help; it just wanted government to stay out of the way. You say he was “kidding himself” when he said that. What’s the most striking way in which the company benefits from the government?

A.

It calls in help from the White House when it needs it; it stands apart at other times. The Bush administration’s attempt to open up Russia’s oil industry, and the way Exxon Mobil slipped into that very high-level diplomatic project, was one example. On another occasion, Cheney intervened to help Exxon Mobil win a major oil deal over Royal Dutch Shell in the United Arab Emirates. That is what Exxon Mobil wants from the American government — decisive help in a pinch, but only when the corporation requests it, and on its terms.

Q.

You write that Exxon is “both part of the problem and part of the solution” in some of the countries where it operates. What do you mean by that, and how do you think it could move that balance more toward solution?

A.

Because of changes in the global oil economy since the 1970s, Exxon Mobil has been driven into weak and unstable states – in West Africa, for example. Its power in these states is especially outsize because of the checks it writes to poor, corrupt, dictatorial governments, and also because of the prize that its oil and gas fields offers to contending guerrillas and coup-makers. So, not so much because it has “Exxon Mobil” written on the door, but because of this geopolitical structure, the corporation is often a more destabilizing or retarding force in poor countries than its executives are willing to acknowledge. The question is, what are Exxon Mobil’s responsibilities, then, as a corporation? Sure, its operations lift up a relatively small number of people through employment and education. But what more is it reasonable to expect it to do as a corporate citizen? It’s gotten somewhat better in corporate responsibility, and its record on environmental standards is relatively strong, but overall it remains behind the curve — its decisions and policies in Africa, for example, are more shaped by engineers, finance men and lawyers than by creative thinkers or business visionaries.

Q.

The company came out in support of a carbon tax, partly because it didn’t want cap-and-trade restrictions. How much is the carbon tax support — and the company’s environmental gestures more generally — just a public relations move?

A.

You’ll hear different opinions about that. Their record in the main is that they mean what they say. They took what I would judge to be a radical stance of campaigning against mainstream climate science during the late 1990s and the first Bush term. Then they shifted — after doing a good deal of damage, in my judgment. Their support for a carbon tax is now on record, and I’d be surprised if they reversed it.

Q.

Even Exxon Mobil acknowledges that oil is a finite resource. But the book makes clear that global demand is only going to escalate, and that alternative energies as we currently know them are not going to meet that demand. So is it just completely impossible to imagine what the world of energy consumption will look like, say, 200 years from now?

A.

Two hundred years is a long time, even in the slow-changing world energy system. I don’t think we’ll be burning fossil fuels with abandon in 200 years – assuming we don’t set ourselves way backward economically by having a nuclear war or some such cataclysm. An era of renewable, sustainable energy systems is surely coming. You can argue over whether the turning point will be within 30 to 50 years or more like a hundred years. But something is going to have to give before 2200. It would be fun to come back and see what that something is.